Biopolitics And Resistance In Legal Education

Taking up the study of legal education in distinctly biopolitical terms, this book provides a critical and political analysis of resistance in the law school. Legal education concerns the complex pathways by which an individual becomes a lawyer, making the journey from lay-person to expert, from student to practitioner. To pose the idea of a biopolitics of legal education is not only to recognise the tensions surrounding this journey but also to recognise that legal education is a key site in which the subject engages, and is engaged by, a particular structure—and here the particular structure of the law school. This book explores the resistance to that structure, including: different ways in which law’s pedagogic structures might be incomplete, or are being fought against; the use of less conventional elements of cultural discourse to resist the abstraction of the lawyer in students’ subject formation; the centralisation of queer and feminist discourses to disrupt the hierarchies of the legal curriculum; the use of digital technologies; the place of embodiment in legal education settings; and the impacts of posthuman knowledges and contexts on legal learning. Assembling original, field-defining essays by both leading international scholars and emerging researchers, this book constitutes an indispensable resource in legal education research and scholarship that will appeal to legal academics everywhere.

Taking up the study of legal education in distinctly biopolitical terms, this book provides a critical and political analysis of structure in the law school. Legal education concerns the complex pathways by which an individual becomes a lawyer, making the journey from lay-person to expert, from student to practitioner. To pose the idea of a biopolitics of legal education is not only to recognise the tensions surrounding this journey, but also to recognise that legal education is a key site in which the subject engages, and is engaged by, a particular structure—and here the particular structure of the law school. This book explores that structure by addressing the characteristics of the biopolitical orders engaged in legal education, including: understanding the lawyer as a commodity, unpicking the force relations in legal education, examining the ways codes of conduct in higher education impact academic freedom, as well as putting the distinctly Western structures of legal learning within a wider context. Assembling original, field-defining essays by both leading international scholars and emerging researchers, it constitutes an indispensable resource in legal education research and scholarship that will appeal to legal academics everywhere.

Examines different ways of understanding power in copyright, trademark and patent policy.

Law, Ethics and the Biopolitical explores the idea that legal authority is no longer related to national sovereignty, but to the ‘moral’ attempt to nurture life. The book argues that whilst the relationship between law and ethics has long been a central concern in legal studies, it is now the relationship between law and life that is becoming crucial. The waning legitimacy of conventional conceptions of sovereignty is signalled the renewal of a version of natural law, evident in discourses of human rights, that de-emphasises the role of a divine law-giver in favour of an Aristotelian conception of the natural purpose of life and the ‘common good’. Synthesising elements of legal scholarship on sovereignty, theories of biopolitics and biopower, as well as recent developments in the domains of ethics, Amy Swiffen examines the invocation of ‘life’ as a foundation for legal authority. The book documents the connection between law, life and contemporary forms of biopolitical power by critically analysing the fundamental principles of the bioethical paradigm. Unique in its critical and cross-disciplinary approach, Law, Ethics and the Biopolitical will be of interest to students and teachers in the areas of law and society, law and literature, critical legal studies, social theory, bioethics, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics.

This edited volume explores the intersection between the coded realm of the video game and the equally codified space of law through an insightful collection of critical readings. Law is the ultimate multiplayer role-playing game. Involving a process of world-creation, law presents and codifies the parameters of licit and permitted behaviour, requiring individuals to engage their roles as a legal subject – the player-avatar of law – in order to be recognised, perform legal actions, activate rights or fulfil legal duties. Although traditional forms of law (copyright, property, privacy, freedom of expression) externally regulate the permissible content, form, dissemination, rights and behaviours of game designers, publishers, and players, this collection examines how players simulate, relate, and engage with environments and experiences shaped by legality in the realm of video game space. Featuring critical readings of video games as a means of understanding law and justice, this book contributes to the developing field of cultural legal studies, but will also be of interest to other legal theorists, socio-legal scholars, and games theorists.

In Gender and Biopolitics: The Changing Patterns of Womanhood in Post-2002 Turkey, Pınar Sarıgöl sheds new light on the life spheres of the woman as a means of uncovering neoliberal Islamic thinking with regard to individuals and the population. Informed by Michel Foucault's critical perspective, the governmental rationality of post-2002 Turkey's Islamic neoliberalism is examined in this volume. The tenets and merits of Islamic neoliberalism bring moral and religious practices into the discussion regarding ‘how’ the social order should be in general, and ‘how’ the ideal woman should be in particular. Islam and neoliberalism are well matched here because Islam takes society as a social body in which hierarchies and roles are divinely normalised. This book uniquely brings this point to the fore and draws attention to the interplay between the rational and moral values constituting Islamic neoliberal female subjects.

Issues in reproductive ethics, such as the capacity of parents to ‘choose children’, present challenges to philosophical ideas of freedom, responsibility and harm. This book responds to these challenges by proposing a new framework for thinking about the ethics of reproduction that emphasizes the ways that social norms affect decisions about who is born. The book provides clear and thorough discussions of some of the dominant problems in reproductive ethics - human enhancement and the notion of the normal, reproductive liberty and procreative beneficence, the principle of harm and discrimination against disability - while also proposing new ways of addressing these. The author draws upon the work of Michel Foucault, especially his discussions of biopolitics and norms, and later work on ethics, alongside feminist theorists of embodiment to argue for a new bioethics that is responsive to social norms, human vulnerability and the relational context of freedom and responsibility. This is done through compelling discussions of new technologies and practices, including the debate on liberal eugenics and human enhancement, the deliberate selection of disabilities, PGD and obstetric ultrasound.

This book offers an original analysis and theorization of the biopolitics of development in the postcolonial present, and draws significantly from the later works of Michel Foucault on biopolitics. Foucault’s works have had a massive influence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political science and international relations, and several authors of this book have themselves made significant contributions to that influence. While Foucault’s thought has been inspirational for understanding colonial biopolitics as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead, they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment with the political itself in postcolonial works and studies. Working against the grain of current Foucauldian scholarship, this book underlines the importance of Foucault’s work for the capacity to recognize how this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of ‘development’, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. It explores how we can use Foucault’s ideas to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically at a time when fundamentally human capacities to think, know and to act purposively in the world are being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and ‘underdevelopment’ of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today, this book tackles some significant questions and problems: Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have; nor that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn the life of postcolonial peoples more fully; but that of how such peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove their lives of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.